Elliott Cottington
Reporter
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYYlFsannMQ
While students are limited to choosing from the small selection of food in the Lounge, teachers have the opportunity to enjoy a restaurant setting with food prepared especially for them in the monthly Rams Cafe. This mock restaurant is run by the Culinary Essentials class and allows students to experience a more realistic cooking experience in a lifelike restaurant setting.
Prior to the creation of this elective, students didn’t have access to a cooking course that taught them the real world skills they would need in a professional setting, prompting the creation of the course by teacher Donna Sapienza. “Well, we offered lots of foods and nutrition courses with quite a few students enrolled and they were asking for another class,” she said. “And so we decided to go with an authentic experience that was a real working world experience and so we came up with the idea of running a restaurant and having the students actually do the food preparation, planning and serving.”
Even though most students who take Culinary Essentials have taken a prerequisite foods course, they still go through a rigorous training process. “They come into the class and they learn how to prepare food safely in sanitary conditions, they go through the ServSafe program, and they learn how to use the knives safely and effectively and efficiently,” Ms. Sapienza said. “From there on, they get a booklet that walks them through the process of planning the meals for Rams Cafe.”
Each student has their own reason for joining the class, but for senior Molly James, her passion for the culinary arts is what motivated her to enroll in the course. “I really enjoyed cooking since freshman year in highschool, I bake a lot and I love cooking at home so I took the foods class originally and then I really wanted to continue and Rams Cafe was what was open,” Molly said.
Similarly, senior Alyssa Thompson saw the course as a way to gain a sense of a real, working kitchen. “I took the baking class first semester and I really enjoyed it and I’ve cooked for as long as I can remember,” Alyssa said. “I wanted to get a sense of how an industrial kitchen would work in a more restaurant situation so culinary was perfect and participating in Rams Cafe is a blast.”
The class teaches the skills necessary to ensure a successful Cafe. “We get a big packet that has every single step of the way for planning Rams Cafe,” Molly said. “We pick what our theme is going to be, what recipes we want, we go online, we look at what we want for plating and how its going to be presented and then we do some test runs of recipes to see if they work and if they don’t we pick another one.”
Even though the students enjoy the freedom of planning and executing the event, certain aspects have to be monitored by Ms. Sapienza to guarantee that the process goes smoothly. “Even before guests come in we may taste a recipe and say something isn’t quite right, we’re gonna make a slight adjustment and we do that all the time,” Ms. Sapienza said. “It really takes a little bit of time to tweak it and decide what’s gonna go well and what will go well with adults eating it, because we’re not really serving to teenagers or students here, were serving to adults. So they have to make sure it will appeal to an adult population.”
Despite the complicated process and lengthy preparations, the success of the Rams Cafe is what both the students and Ms. Sapienza hope for. “I think at the end, seeing all the teachers really enjoying the food that we make and then everything coming together is what makes it a success,” Molly said. “It’s just been an idea and now it comes and it’s physical and you see everyone eating your food, it’s really fun.”
